Mythic Europe and the Order of Hermes

• The Shape of Europe:
  • Essays on Mythic Europe
• The Shape of the Order:
  • The Origins of Hermetic Magic
  • The "Houses" of Hermes
  • Apprenticeships and Gauntlets
  • Arch-Magi
• The Shape of the Tribunal:
  • The Praeco and The Domus Magnus
  • The Quaesitoris
  • The Redcaps

Mythic Europe is big. Very big. Excepting royal couriers and others with access to fresh mounts on a regular basis, it can take months to get from one end of Europe to the other. Roads are not common, and troubles along the way (bad weather, wild beasts, bandits, and worse) make long journeys a significant challenge. It can be easy to overlook sometimes, when looking at Mythic Europe from above--Barcelona and Bayonne don't look that far away on a map--but try getting from one to the other on foot, through the Pyrenees, during the rainy season. A traveller could be delayed for days, weeks, or even months.

Travel between two cities is one thing. But covenants tend to be located off the beaten path, atop mountains or in the middle of forests. Few have horses, so travel to and from most covenants must be done on foot, usually along rough and winding paths. As covenants tend to space themselves out in order to avoid conflicts over resources, it is quite feasible that the nearest covenant is a two week journey away. A two week trek is not something to be undertaken lightly, especially if the travellers must carry all their gear.

Travel between most covenants then, is not going to be an every-day occurrence. In most cases it will be reserved for significant meetings and important messages. And even important messages can be significantly delayed, meaning the spreading of information to the Order will be an inexact science at best. To use a historical example, in 1190 AD the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa died in Cilicia (southern Turkey) during the Crusade. It took four months for the important news to reach his empire in Germany.

This sense of isolation is generally missing in the 'top down' descriptions given in the 3rd and 4th edition material. The assumption in those texts seems to be that the Order is a well-oiled institution that is capable of keeping tabs on all its members; that wizards from opposite ends of Europe can and do meet on a fairly regular basis; and that the ties of multi-national organizations (such as Houses) are more important to magi than the local issues that directly affect their lives. The distances between covenants, however, makes these things difficult to accept at best.

From an individual perspective, the most important Hermetic contact a magus has are those fellow wizards in his own covenant. They are probably the only wizards he sees on a regular basis. Beyond that, he looks to the covenants of his Tribunal, which are, for most magi, the furthest covenants he will ever visit. While rumours and out-of-date information will reach him about the great covenants of foreign Tribunals, what happens to them on a month-to-month or even year-to-year basis is not important. It is the neighbouring covenants of the Tribunal that will give the individual magus a sense of community within the Order. It will be the local covenants that set his political agenda and raise issues that concern him. Why should an Iberian wizard care about the political concerns of a wizard in Loch Leglean or Novgorod? Even if there were some kind of continent-wide crisis (eg, the fall of magic, an invasion), the distance is too vast to collaborate; at best those closest to the crisis could try to warn those furthest away before it is too late.

While inter-Tribunal meetings might produce grand decrees or laws (like the Code), it is up to individual Tribunals to police them. Unlike other institutions that spanned Europe (ie, Empires and the Church), the Order of Hermes has no head, and relies on votes to choose direction. Voting requires gathering, and gathering simply cannot happen on a continent-wide scale. The Order's largest political unit, in practical terms, must be the Tribunal. This requires some adjustments to the way the Order of Hermes is generally perceived, because the texts include a number of political associations (eg, Houses, the council of Arch-Magi) that are Order-wide. There are also some conventions, such as Redcap circuits, Voting Sigils and Apprentice Gauntlets, that are hard to justify when approached from an individual perspective.